April 3, 2013

If you haven’t seen the video already, check this one out. It shows Rutgers University’s basketball head coach Mike Rice being a first class asshole to his players. In this video he is seen throwing basketballs at the players in practice, and calling them faggots and fairies. (How is it that calling someone gay means they are not ‘men’ or ‘tough’?)

Here’s another one, but this time it is a high school coach. It is an audio clip that Howard Stern played on his radio show. You’ve got to hear it to believe it.

So why do grown men act this way? Because they are douche-bags.
I suspect the answer really is that they are very insecure, very concerned with how they look, very unenlightened, have no self-awareness, no equanimity, have big egos and feel very bad about themselves. They behave out of deep feelings of inadequacy. Furthermore, they are taking out their personal issues on the players. Sort of like the ‘kick-the-dog’ syndrome where a man is treated badly by his boss at work and comes home and kicks the dog. These asshole coaches transfer their perceived personal injustices on their players. Of course they don’t know they are doing this, but maybe a little self-reflection would go a long way.

I am a grown man now and I remember having coaches like this in high school. I remember one time at basketball practice our coach whipped a basketball at one of my team mates and friend of mine out of frustration, hit him in the head and made him cry and run to the locker room. What a fucking asshole douche-bag this coach was. Can you imagine having so little self control, so little self-awareness and perspective, such pettiness, and exhibiting such childish behavior? At the time it just made me very afraid of the coach, I was 15 years old after all. Now I realize there was nothing to be afraid of. Now I realize that people like this are truly suffering inside most of the time and that is how it comes out. They act out of feelings of profound inadequacy. I pity the fool who treats my sons this way.

Coaches who behave like this are more concerned with how they look to the outside world, more concerned with being perceived as a great coach, and care very little for the experience of the players. Can you imagine that the administration of Rutgers didn’t fire this guy the minute they found this out? They suspended him and that was it. And by the way, this Mike Rice had a losing record for the three years he has been at Rutgers! All that yelling and yet all those losses!

This also reminds me of good ‘ole Sandusky and Penn State and how winning was more important than than anything else.

Pathetic. And these coaches? Pathetic douche-bag arseholes who don’t deserve to guide anyone.

January 26, 2012

If you own or run a website, have you ever gone through your website statistics? Whether it’s Google Analytics or Open Web Analytics, the log files on your website’s server can be seen through a variety of analytics programs that help you see a lot of the activity related to your site.

One thing I like to do is peruse the keyword phrases people type into the search engines to find my site here, opinionated.net. The words and phrases used offer a glimpse into human nature. Here’s what I mean.

First of all, people really struggle with spelling the word opinionated. Here are some of the attempts:

I penned another post about people not believing in evolution, and I got into an argument via the comments with a reader who did not believe in evolution, which I think is nutty. Here are some phrases that found this post:

how many people do not believe in evolution

how can you not believe in evolution

how can people believe in evolution

how can someone not believe in evolution

what can i tell to people that do not believe in evolution

I also wrote a post on how TV makes us dumb and this is another question people are rightly concerned with. Here are some phrases that found this post:

was television created to make us stupid

television makes children dumb and passive

watching tv makes you smarter because

television making us dumber

television making kids stupid

There are a lot more examples in my stats. But I bet if you checked yours out, you would be surprised to discover what people are saying and asking.

July 30, 2011

All the following hilarious inspirational posters - or de-motivational posters - were sent to me over the years as email attachments. I figured I’d re-publish them here (the websites where these posters are from appear at the bottom of most of them - I give credit to the people who created these clever and very funny pictures).

June 8, 2011

As can be expected, the media has been having an adolescent’s field day with the congressman Anthony Wiener scandal. With this story, it’s insane how lame our media is. The righteous indignation, the hypocritical silliness, the feminizing of America, is at Defon 5 on this one.

But regardless of what you think, we can all agree that there have been some good headlines created because of this. Here are some of the best Anthony Wiener headlines.
(a lot of these are from #WeinerHeadlines)

A. Sexting online is not that horrible
B. All men are pervs, simple as that , don’t act so surprised!
C. You can be a perv AND be great at your job
D. Clinton got blown in the White House and people forgave him enough for him to remain president
E. As Howard Stern so hilariously and pointedly remarked today, Ted Kennedy drove off a friggen bridge with a woman in the passenger side, didn’t save her, could have been drinking, and went home and went to bed and survived politically. Showing your wiener to a woman online isn’t as bad.

March 14, 2011

I suppose there have been plenty of books written on the subject of how raising children is difficult, or maybe not come to think of it. Most books are on being a parent or how to specifically parent infants, toddlers or teenagers, or how to raise happy, responsible or emotionally intelligent children. But are there any books on how unbelievably hard it is?!

A search on Amazon.com yielded a big fat zero. I am reminded of the seemingly infinite number of commercials where the baby or toddler is happy, smiling and giggling. I’m sure you’ve seen a Gerber TV commercial, where the baby is gushing and the mom is effusively welcoming her toddler into her embrace. So for the most part, the media contributes to this myth we have in western society that parenting is easy and fun.

In fact, it seems almost taboo to say that you hate parenting sometimes, that raising toddlers can be a never-ending nightmare of poop, cleaning, time-outs and futile attempts at self control.

Well, I am here to tell you that raising kids is unbelievably hard! (If you have any hope of remotely doing it right, that is.) If you don’t particularly care about how your child turns out, you don’t mind adding another dysfunctional person to the world, then I guess parenting may not be that bad.

But if you have any decency and love for your children, then trying to do it right most of the time is difficult indeed.

I now have two toddlers, one is what you’d call “difficult”, “challenging” or “explosive”, or as I like to call him, a pain in the ass. I love him with all my heart, but he makes our lives miserable sometimes. (Of course he makes our lives very joyous even more.)

Our other one is a little less challenging, but still a rambunctious toddling boy, and he’s now ambulatory, curious and completely careless.

I work full time and find it often difficult to handle the boys at night and on weekends with the help of my wife, I wonder how she does it alone every week day for the most part. And I certainly wonder how inner-city single moms of 3 or more handle it. I suspect badly often times.

But don’t worry if you too have felt like you wanted to keep driving past your driveway at the end of the day to avoid the craziness of toddlerville. One of my buddies recently said to me that all week he looks forward to the weekend so he doesn’t have to work. And by Sunday night, after helping with the kids all weekend, he’s very much looking forward to Monday morning and going back to work. I think that’s the case with a lot of stuff in life.

October 23, 2010

The ignorant, backwards, unenlightened ridiculousness of those homophobic Americans who give a shit what gays do is mind-boggling to me. Whether gay people can get legally married or not, whether gay people can be open in the military, whether politicians are for giving equal rights to gays, whether gays can adopt . . . blah, blah, blah. I’ve got a question for all of you who actually care about denying gays equal rights: WHY DO YOU CARE?

Why would anyone waste their time trying to stop same-sex marriage? Why would the Pentagon, the military and congress waste their time and our tax dollars debating ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’?

Okay, let’s briefly examine the inane, dim and homophobic “reasons” many people give to the above questions.

Why would anyone waste their time trying to stop gays from getting married?
The answer is often because we don’t want to threaten the”family”. If gays can get legally married then the whole atomic family unit will be at risk of disintegrating. The American “family” being a mom, dad and 2.5 kids. God forbid there were two moms or two dads.

Of course the American “family” now doesn’t quite resemble that anymore. Instead there’s lots and lots of single moms with kids, deadbeat dads and divorces. What’s more, there’s tons of infidelity.

There’s nothing more disgusting than a hypocritical politician who denounces gays getting equal marriage rights because of risk to the “family” and then gets caught cheating on his wife. Cheating puts the “family” at risk and threatens it, not gay marriage.

Why don’t the people who actively fight against same sex marriage also actively fight against deadbeat dads or people who commit infidelity? Don’t they threaten the “family” too?

We need some more loving two-person homes in America. We need lots more. And if two gay people can provide that then all the better!

Why would the Pentagon, the military and congress waste their time and our tax dollars debating ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’?
The typical answer to this is even more ridiculous and uninformed. Military people say gay men can’t be in the same showers and housing as strait men because the strait men are at risk of getting “hit” on or even sexually assaulted by their gay colleagues. They say gays will distract the straits, they will do it in front of the straits, maybe even rape them! I randomly looked this up on Google and found a forum debating this. Here’s one moron’s comments:

.. It amuses me how people that have never served and
never plan on serving can tell Veterans, people
currently serving and pentagon officials what is best for
the military.
.. As I’ve pointed out before, Most males that serve are
and have been Alpha male type. These males are Not interested
in living in close quarters with homosexuals. They don’t want
to be around that sexual lifestyle. Solider A doesn’t want
to live in close living quarters where Solider X and Solider Z
are doing each other in the butt in the same room they have
to sleep in.
.. This $#!T isn’t hard to understand, it is shameful how some
want to diminish our Great Military. The U.S Military is
a Volinteer military. You jacka$$es are going to kill recruitment
re-enlistment.

Holy Christ. Talking to people who say those types of things leaves me feeling incredulous and dumbfounded. “Kill recruitment re-enlistment”? Those who wouldn’t join the military because they may see and be near gays will have the same problem with almost any other profession too, since gays are everywhere and ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell, is thankfully only in the military. And here’s a fairly decent response from the same forum:

I do not believe you are or have ever been in the military.

We do not serve because we are alpha male types, we are not afraid of living in quarters with someone different than us. We are not concerned if Jim may or may not be checking out our junk, we are concerned that Jim is watching our back and doing his job to keep us safe. We arent so damn stupid that we are worried about Soldier A and Soldier X doing each other in the rear end in the same room as us because that wouldnt happen anyways unless you are in the most worthless unit on the planet.

We serve to protect our country and defend our freedoms. We serve with our brothers (and sisters) regardless of what color they are, who they pray to, or who they may or may not like to date in their free time.

Ever listen to the song ‘Us and Them’ by Pink Floyd off ‘Dark Side of the Moon’? I ask this because unenlightened, non self-reflective, insecure and fearful people tend to resonate with the ‘us and them’ mentality. Us strong, alpha-male types vs. them, sissy, gay types. Black and white. Reality isn’t like that however.

You know who else tends to see things in black and white? Children.

I saw a homophobic military guy on TV being interviewed about his opinion of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ and he said this, “I don’t like gay people, I don’t want to be anywhere near them, I don’t want to work with them and I thankfully have never met a gay person.”

A quick search on Google yielded these results: Anywhere between 2-10% of people are gay. So unless you’ve met less than 88 people in your life, you’ve met a gay person. And the percentage may be higher since it has proven difficult to measure the exact percentage of gay people in the population.

And if I hear one more person say that gay people choose to be gay, I will scream. Don’t be an idiot, ya moron!

The point is, if I was in a foxhole with another soldier, I would not care if he liked banging other men or Martians, I’d just want him to be a good soldier who would have my back (no pun intended).

And if I were a new born baby I would rather have two gay, same-sex parents who loved me and stayed together in a loving marriage than parents who hated each other and got divorced parents or a single parent only.

So please stop giving a shit about what gay people can and cannot do. It is meaningless and divisive, and conveniently obfuscates the real issues, much to the politicians’ delight.

October 8, 2010

My three-year-old sat on my lap when I opened my browser to the Google homepage. It looked like this:

He asked me what that was, so I played it - the chorus from Imagine - and then I opened iTunes and played Beautiful Boy for him, relishing the feeling that John Lennon already knew how I felt with my son on my lap, long before my son was born. Although the title of this post is a tad rough around the edges, I think it is quite appropriate for my opinion. Fuck you Chapman for taking John Lennon away from us. Imagine all the music he could have written had he lived.

Thank you Google for remembering John Lennon today by putting this on your homepage. The Beatles genius Lennon would have been 70 years old today had he not been shot and killed by Mark David Chapman. What a shithead Chapmam was/is. He was recently up for parole, but denied and I hope he rots in prison. There was absolutely no need to gun down such a gentle, thoughtful and talented person. What a waste.

August 6, 2010

July 13, 2010

Prince is about to release a new album, 20TEN. But I don’t think Prince or even the artist formerly known as Prince, is the least bit relevant anymore. His music is decidedly 80’s. But whether you like his music or not, he is very much out of it, and sounds like an elderly curmudgeon who simply will not accept change. In an interview with the Daily Mirror recently he actually said:

“The Internet’s completely over,” he said. “I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it, and then they get angry when they can’t get it. . . The Internet’s like MTV, At one time, MTV was hip, and suddenly it became outdated.”

Over? Are you out of your fucking mind Prince? Like MTV? How can you compare a cable TV channel that mainly played music videos with a brand new medium that has connected the entire planet, given voices to billions who otherwise were mute, offers infinite business opportunities for individuals to multi-national corporations and so much more?

Prince, you could not have said a more ignorant thing, a thing that cements your irrelevancy and a thing that will surely alienate you from anyone under 50.

“I really believe in finding new ways to distribute my music,” the artist formerly known as Prince told the Daily Mirror in an exclusive interview today. He also said he hates online music distribution.

Prince won’t allow sites such as eMusic or iTunes or any other website, legitimate or not, from selling his music.

And his official site shut down as well. So The Guy Formerly Know as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince doesn’t exist on the Internet at all and seems a little less real for it.

Now Prince is on tour again (and selling tickets via the Internet) to shows in Charlotte, at the Forum in L.A. and other cities.

May 5, 2010

May 3, 2010

Even before the ongoing oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico the people who said, chanted and painted on signs “Drill baby drill!” should have been ashamed of themselves. I wonder how they feel now? Let’s see them pull out those dumb sings now at a Sarah Palin ‘event’ or something similar. C’mon, be proud, drill baby drill! Regarding the Gulf ecosystem, the fish, turtles and so forth, these people ought to chant, ‘Kill baby kill!’ as well.

And when they built that oil rig that is continually spewing oil, didn’t they have any kind of contingency plan for turning the thing off?! It is very sad thing going on right now.

April 2, 2010

First, let me start off by saying that one can find any ’study’ to back up one’s opinion’s, belief’s and convictions. So anything I read about studies online I take with a grain of salt.

With that said, I recently came across one, then another study that made me happy I was a liberal rather than a conservative.And the studies were cited in reputable websites, Wired and CNN.

A report published on 9/19/2008 in the journal Science about a study conducted by University of Nebraska-Lincoln political science professor John Hibbing.

People with strongly conservative views were three times more fearful than staunch liberals after the effects of gender, age, income and education were factored out.

Kevin B. Smith, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a study author, said conservatives were more vigilant to environmental threats, and he speculated that this innate tendency led them to support policies that protect the social order.

Fowler said the study added to the growing research suggesting that over millions of years, humans have developed two cognitive styles — conservative and liberal. Cautious conservatives prevented societies from taking undue risks, while more flexible liberals fostered cooperation.

The other study I came across was from Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science. Kanazawa correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. And these findings were published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly. For example, the study found that young adults who said they were “very conservative” had an average adolescent IQ of 95, whereas those who said they were “very liberal” averaged 106.

The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans’ evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.

“The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward,” said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. “It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people — people with, sort of, more intellectual firepower — are likely to be the ones to do that.”

February 25, 2010

I was watching the Today show this morning and Meredith Vierra passed the story on to Kerry Sanders who was on the scene at Sea World in Orland, FL where a Killer Whale killed its trainer. The first thing Sanders said was, “We’re not sure exactly what went wrong here but . . . ”

Not sure what went wrong? An animal with the word ‘killer’ in its name killed a person. That’s what happened. Very simple. I am getting so sick of wild animals killing people stories and the surprise that everyone seems to have. Last year a pet monkey horribly attacked and maimed it’s owner’s friend in Connecticut. Again, people were surprised.

I vaguely remember a tiger in captivity at some private place in the U.S. killing it’s owner recently.

I also remember a story of a boa constrictor in a home in Florida sneaking out of its cage, slithering to the toddler’s room and promptly killing the baby.

Maybe people shouldn’t mess with, play with, train or even be around wild animals. People shouldn’t be surprised when bad things happen when wild animals are involved. Animals are fucked with enough by man and man’s inexorable manifest destiny of taking over every square foot of habitat on Earth. Then we put wild animals in captivity, try to train them for shows like in Sea World, all for our pleasure (really to make money), and then someone gets hurt or killed, we all act surprised and then we kill the animal. It’s really outrageous.

Although the killer whale and these other stories are tragic and I have sympathy for the victims and families, animals do not belong locked up.